Dworkin tries to present Scalia with a dilemma. He can be an expectation originalist or a semantic originalist. The difference between the two is best illustrated by the “hire the best person for the job” example.
Dworkin thinks Scalia has to choose between an objectionable theory and his favored understanding of the Constitution’s meaning. Expectation originalism does not fit Scalia’s claims about statutory interpretation and would yield what Scalia regarded as the wrong answer in the Holy Trinity case. But semantic originalism doesn’t support Scalia’s conclusions about what the Constitution says. So Scalia faces a dilemma: he has to choose between the proper approach to cases like Holy Trinity and his opinions about the Constitution. The latter require “expectation” originalism while the former require “semantic” originalism.
Scalia opts for semantic originalism. He says that the Constitution sets out abstract principles that the courts have to interpret and apply in novel circumstances. These principles were not meant to be limited to what the people at the time knew. For example, he thinks that the Eighth Amendment rules out torture using electrical equipment like cattle prods, bright lights, and recorded music, even though these things were unknown in the eighteenth century.
Since everyone claims to be a semantic originalist, the debate comes down to how to understand the abstract principles that are in the Constitution. We discussed this through a specific example: their disagreement about the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment
Dworkin thinks the original meaning of the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment is that the state is forbidden to use whatever punishments are truly cruel. The challenge they left for future generations was to figure out what cruelty genuinely means. It is an invitation to engage in moral philosophy in order to discover the truth about the values mentioned in the Constitution in order to apply them to novel cases.
Scalia thinks the original meaning of the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment is that the state is forbidden to use whatever punishments people at the time would have recognized as cruel. The challenge for future generations was to figure out what people in the late eighteenth century would have regarded as cruel. It is an invitation to engage in historical investigation to discover what those people’s values were like in order to apply them to novel cases.
Dworkin thinks that the original meaning of the Constitution forces future generations to come up with the best understanding of what phrases like “cruel and unusual” mean. Scalia thinks it’s obvious that the Bill of Rights was meant to address the possibility of backsliding. Future generations might have had depraved understandings of what is cruel and the Constitution was written to block them from making the country worse.
One problem with pairing these two is that we get more of Dworkin’s criticisms of Scalia than we do of his own views. Dworkin’s opinions are most fully articulated in his book Law’s Empire (Dworkin 1986). But he also published a more compact statement in an article in the New York Review of Books titled “The Moral Reading of the Constitution” (Dworkin 1996). Its themes are very close to what we read, but it does more to flesh out Dworkin’s views.
Dworkin, Ronald. 1986. Law’s Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
———. 1996. “The Moral Reading of the Constitution.” New York Review of Books, March 21.